Ryzen 3000: AMD's 12-Core Ryzen 9 3900X Conquers Its Past

With its ground-breaking 7nm process, AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X leaves very little room for Intel’s best CPUs.

- Gordon Mah Ung

Our review of AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, in five words: Damn, this CPU is fast.But keep reading, because the Ryzen 9 3900X is likely as significant, and likely as game-changing, as AMD’s original K7 Athlon-series of CPUs that crossed the 1GHz line first, or its Athlon 64 CPU that ushered in 64-bit computing in a desktop PC.

You’d think the Ryzen 9 3900X would have a hard time achieving the same greatness. It’s true that it doesn’t quite shake all the gaming-performance bugaboos of past generations. But we think when the dust settles, the CPU series will easily be a firstballot, CPU hall of fame entry.

It is, after all, the first consumer x86 chip to be produced on a 7nm process node. Intel’s current desktop chips are still all built on a 14nm process node, and the company will just begin to move to 10nm later this year. We suspect the chip giant is a little envious that AMD reached this tiny die shrink first.

With that production technology lead, AMD breaks out a redesigned 2nd-generation “Zen” core for the Ryzen 3000 that promises double the floating point performance over the previous Ryzen 2000 series, as well as a 15-percent increase in “instructions per clock” (think overall efficiency per clock).

On an even deeper level, AMD said it has improved instruction pre-fetching, further enhanced the instruction cache and doubled the micro-op cache. Besides doubling the floating point performance, AMD has now adopted AVX-256 (256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions; and yes, Intel fans, we know Core has AVX-512). AVX’s impact is mostly seen in video encoding today, but it can rear its performance head elsewhere too.